


Inevitabilities

by forpeaches (bluecarrot)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Angst and Feels, F/M, Gen, Modern Era, Post-Apocalypse, Sad, Sad and Happy, Sad with a Sad Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:01:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24764320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluecarrot/pseuds/forpeaches
Summary: after the world ends, they take another journey.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth, Podrick Payne & Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 11
Kudos: 50





	Inevitabilities

**Author's Note:**

> written for someone else but honestly it’s too sad to give away. like, am i going to go to your birthday party just to cry into the cake? who does that? no.

Pod was the one who found Jaime. Not Brienne. She remembered that later.

They hadn’t been looking for him or anyone — just driving, just going out and out until the car broke down or the road gave out or one of those other inevitabilities came up. (That’s what Pod called them: _Inevitiabilities_. Brienne didn’t like it, she didn’t approve of shying away from the facts, but she wasn’t in charge of Podrick’s mind and anyway, there was an odd comfort in the horrible gloom of the phrase. Inevitabitably, they would come to an end of things. In fire, lightning or in rain?)

She was driving. It was Podrick’s car, but she drove. They preferred that, she was better at avoiding potholes and the sort of gross navigation they used nowadays, knowing the general shape of Westerosi roadways rather than the specific places of town, intersection, inn — Pod had a mind for those details and it was barely useful at all, now the inns were burned down, like as not, and the intersections was nothing but another pole with a noose and a body. A hanging-tree.

She knew it haunted him — this memory of how things used to be. It was like remembering the house you used to live in. Throw it out, she could have told him. It doesn’t help you anymore. But Podrick held on to things that didn’t help him, she knew that, and that was fine too.

He was looking out the window, talking more or less endlessly, and she’d more or less tuned him out (Where will we sleep, and How will we find food, and We must do a better job to hide the truck tonight), when Podrick said: “There’s a body.”

She pulled to the side of the road and got out, taking out her shotgun.

Podrick shifted over to the driver’s seat. He knew instructions. If she was hurt, if she was overcome, he was to leave her and go.

 _But_ — he’d said.

 _Go_ , she said. _Promise me._

  
Pod was right, she saw that soon enough. It was a body.

Bodies could be useful. Most often they had something on them in the way of supplies -- matches, rope. Knives. Clothing. Food, if things came to that. 

It had not come to that, she hoped it would not come to that, but winter was coming, and —

A few steps closer now.

It was a man’s body, face pressed into the dirt and leaves, turned away.

Weapon at the ready, Brienne.

She touched him with her foot — soft, then harder. “Hey. Anyone alive in there?”

The body made a noise and curled up around itself. Protecting his stomach. Hurt.

Feigning, maybe. There were no signs of a fight, no blood. He could have seen their truck and —

“You alright?”

“Leave me alone,” he said. “Go on. I’ve nothing you want.”

“I’m not here to hurt you. Nor rob you, either.”

“Go, then,” he said.

Still she stood. She would not leave but she would not let down her guard, either: she told herself that. “Are you injured?”

“Only dying,” he said.

He sounded like it. Rasping, thick, mumbling. Punctuated with moans.

“We’ll bury you,” she said, “if you die. What hurt you?”

“Why don’t you leave me alone? Can’t a man even die in peace, these days? You’re a pigheaded lad.” He shifted a bit and squinted at her, into the sunlight, peering up through the filth on his face, through one bloodshot eye.

Pale green, she thought. She’d only known a few people to have eyes that color, clear and bright as oak leaves, as moss ... oh. Oh, no.

Jaime shut his eyes. He said into the dirt: “Fuck.”

“Are you armed?”

”Always the lover, Brienne. Did you change your mind on robbing me?”

“I was planning to wait til you died,” she said.

Jaime laughed.

Her heart stumbled. Her weapon shook in her shaking hand. Still afraid, Brienne? But she had to ask the question. “Are you really dying?”

“I have never lied to you,” he said.

That was debatable. “Where are you — I’ll get Podrick, he can —“

“Not like that.” He was sweating, she saw that now, and his legs stretched out and drew back up, restless.

She knew what it was like to have pain like that.

“It comes in waves,” he said. “I ate fruit, I thought I knew it...”

”Idiot. When?”

“This morning. Brienne, just stay with me, please —“

But she shook off his hand and ran back to the truck, to Podrick and their precious little hoard of medicine. "Pod -- an emetic --"

The sound of retching went on, mile after mile, a charming accompaniment to the truck’s own arrhythmic hum and clunk and clatter. Every so often Pod looked back and reported on him —  
“Looking green, ser.”

She didn’t care what he looked like or how he smelled or what came out of him or where, so long as he was alive.

  
He was alive the next morning, and the one after that: and then Brienne started to permit herself to hope.

Work was the cure for hope, just like it freed her from the slow rot of fear; she threw herself into hunting (arrows carved by Podrick; the bow she peeled and bent herself), threw herself into carving the meat for Pod to smoke, into digging a latrine-pit and carrying water and practicing her exercises, morning and night. Staying in readiness. Staying ready.

She stayed ready for Jaime to die, she held it parallel with her hope: and Jaime stayed alive.

He slept more than she liked to see, those first days — but he had wet himself and more in the truck, and he was thin from long hunger. He was tired, he was recovering ... She poked a stick into the ashes of the fire, hardening it for an arrow-shaft.  
“You missed him?” said Pod at last.

“I thought he was dead,” she said. _Assumed_ would be a better word. She’d assumed he had died in Kings Landing when everyone else (it seemed) had died, in the earth shaking or the belching green wildfire afterwards or the sickness and mad horror that rose up after that, when the city broke into gangs of hunter and prey.

It was a miracle to find Podrick.

It was cruelty, she thought, to find Jaime.

She turned the arrow-shaft baking in the fire. “I missed him,” she said.

Three days after that, Jaime kissed her.

She was folding the clothes they’d washed that morning in the river, smiling at something foolish that Jaime had said — smiling because he had said it to make her smile.  
She looked over at him, feeling foolish and tender, and he kissed her.

He gripped on to her tunic when he did it like he thought she’d push him away, and probably she would have if she’d had any bit of sense left in her, but all that was gone because he was here and he was alive when she'd thought he was dead, and when he pulled back a little, giving them space to breathe, she nodded. _Yes_.

Jaime didn’t move.

“Yes,” she said, tugging at him now, at the hand that had been on her. “Come on—“

Things were easier, now they were alone. They didn’t have to look at each other, they knew what they’d find. She could take off his trousers and not be afraid, anymore, that he would turn away if she touched him, if he touched her, if she was too loud or too grasping or too much. She was too much, she always was, and he took it in.

Afterwards they lay awhile half-clothed on the same leaves they’d fucked on: Jaime still had his boots on, and Brienne hadn’t taken off her shirt.

She smiled at him.

“I missed that,” he said. “I missed you.”

Brienne lay on her back and looked up, into the branches, into the sky. She’d thought he was dead and he was here and he was alive ... “Took you long enough,” she said.

They talked a little more and loved a little more and dawdled, returning to the campground. “Podrick’s a help to you,” he said.

“We help each other.”

“I didn’t think he’d ... I don’t expect people like him to live long. Girls,” he said. “Usually the dead ones are girls ...”

“I don’t think you know many.”

He considered this. She loved him for listening to her, for wondering if she was right; it expanded in her chest like a flower. “That's fair enough, I suppose. The only one I've ever really known is you.”

”And Cersei.”

”Cersei was never like other girls.”

Neither was I, thought Brienne. Maybe none of them were, maybe that was the point -- but she didn’t argue. “We should be getting back,” she said. “It’ll be getting late.”

So they tidied their clothes and picked leaves out of each other’s hair, teasing, walking easily back to the clearing where they’d left Podrick, where the truck was gone and the bare dirt was torn up and bloody, and the small, careful fire still sent up its column of smoke.

**Author's Note:**

> “Go then; there are other worlds than these.”


End file.
